Domestic Debates: Constructions of Gendered Migration from the Philippines

Domestic Debates: Contesting Women Migrants’ Absence from Home(land)

Since 1974, when labor export was first institutionalized by the Philippine government as a developmental policy, it has benefited politically by providing jobs to its citizens and economically through the remittances sent by both men and women migrants earned from employment abroad.

By the late 1980s, Filipina international migration began to significantly increase, and by the early 1990s, it rivaled the migration of Filipino men. A majority of these women worked as domestic workers and entertainers. Women’s migration from the Philippines, however, is hardly a new phenomenon as they have migrated, most notably as nurses, since the turn of the 20th century.¹ Moreover, internal migration (i.e. rural-urban) has been a key feature of Philippine women’s employment since the 1960s.²

Yet, it was only during the 1990s, as women’s migration increased in numbers that began to surpass men, and as a greater proportion of women migrants were being deployed to work as entertainers and domestic workers, that anxieties about the migration of women began to emerge and become increasingly widespread in the Philippines. Civil society actors were especially key in inciting and circulating concerns about women’s international migration in the broader public, questioning to what extent out-migration was not only detrimental to the women themselves but to the country as a whole.

Indeed, the highly publicized death of Filipina migrant worker Maricris Sioson in 1991 was important in initially setting off public discussions about women’s out-migration from the Philippines. Sioson, a 22-year old woman who had worked as an entertainer in Japan, returned to the Philippines dead.Though a Japanese hospital concluded that Sioson had died from Hepatitis, it was a conclusion her family did not believe. A second autopsy performed by the Philippines’ National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) revealed that Sioson had died from traumatic head injuries. In addition, the NBI found stab wounds and cuts in Sioson’s vagina.³

The conflicting medical reports generated a flurry of news reports. While media response to Sioson’s murder focused exclusively on the details of the case, or detailed other women migrants’ victimization at the hands of unscrupulous labor recruiters and exploitative employers, some civil society actors, particularly national polling institutes, focused less on sensationalized accounts of women’s victimization. Instead, they drew on social scientific methods to analyze broad patterns of women’s migration examining not only its impact on individual women, but on their families and Philippine society at large.

1. Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. [↩]
2. Sylvia Chant and Cathy McIlwaine, Women of a Lesser Cost: Female Labour, Foreign Exchange and Philippine Development. Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1996. [↩]
3. Bana Batnag, “Maricris Sioson, ‘Japayuki’.” Philippines Free Press, November 2, 1991. [↩]